In order to connect equipment of an aircraft together for communication purposes, the aircraft are equipped with different cabling forming a network, whose installation and maintenance can be complex. Furthermore, this cabling presents a high cost, on the one hand, in terms of cable prices, but also in terms of weight, leading to an increase in fuel consumption during the flight.
In addition, the current networks generally use copper cables forming a star and ring network mixture, of the AFDX “Switched Ethernet” type. The cables use a copper support of two twisted and redundant pairs.
This type of copper cable network has several disadvantages: the metal cables cause problems of electromagnetic disturbances (electromagnetic compatibility, current induction, etc.), the network is hardly adaptable to the modifications (adding new equipment, for example), the network has a flow limited to a few tens of Mb/sec (mainly due to the determining aspect of the TCP protocol), and the weight of the cables is significant (around 32 kg/km, an aeroplane can comprise, for example, several hundred kilometres of cables). To all these disadvantages is furthermore added a high maintenance and modification cost.
A solution proposed to at least some of these disadvantages has been to replace the copper cables with optical fibers. However, the obtained network r does not provide for a great adaptability.